


Quiet

by Jessa



Series: HM Server Prompt Fills [4]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Metamorphosis, Pain, Prompt Fill, Sexual References, mer!Alec, mer!Jace, mer!Magnus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:00:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25643914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jessa/pseuds/Jessa
Summary: Some more burgeoning mer!Malace.A follow-up toScalesfor the HM500 prompt: quiet.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood, Magnus Bane/Jace Wayland
Series: HM Server Prompt Fills [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1850245
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23
Collections: Hunter's Moon 500 Prompts





	Quiet

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy it <3

Magnus has waited patiently for this. Waking nightly in Jace’s arms to listen for the sonar. He kisses Jace in the place he knows he likes it most. Above the eyebrow. On twin rows of scales that grow on all developed mermen. Jace murmurs in response but doesn’t wake. Glad, Magnus wriggles free and slips away to search. Flits from the bleached coral cave and down in pursuit of Alec.

Magnus had hoped to drown it here too. He can tell this is what Alec’s trying. But out here it had all still been. The water hadn’t muted anything. As it seemed to promise Magnus it would. It had amplified his pain. He’d forgotten but now he remembers it well. Can see what he must have looked like too. And feel what he felt then again. For all developed mermen are also empaths.

Alec’s writhing merform emerges from the vast blue wall of the vacant sea and Magnus swims straight for it. Beautiful to observe, twisting as it does, beneath the filtering beam of a freshly-waxed moon. Risen above the ocean’s calm. Belying the turmoil new mermen live through whenever the month transitions.

The moon and the ocean and Magnus all know that Alec’s pain is an echo. The depth he’s reached a chamber. Formed to grow his brand of hurt until it’s heard and answered, and the time-honored process of quietening down begins again. Jace said it was a rite of passage. Another thing Magnus will soon teach to Alec but not until he’s stopped screaming.

Water is cruel. It takes the catharsis of human sound away. As fickle as it's kind to soothe their temporary itches, Magnus remembers well how he too had cursed the ocean’s deception at first. Until it had brought him Jace. So nothing’s here for human ears, no satisfying yell or mourn or wail. Just quiet. And there is nothing for a merman either. Magnus’ ears, as all merfolk's, are shielded to protect them. That’s how loudly Alec’s pain bleats.

Exhausted, he falls to the ocean’s floor and Magnus completes his swim. Scoops Alec from the coarse grey sand and cradles him in scaled arms. The feather-thin fluke of his tail flutters about Alec’s ghostly blue cheeks. But his flesh is warm and reminiscent of all dry things. Magnus remembers Alexander.

“Shhh,” he breathes, lifting his hand to his lover’s face, still twisted in pain. Touching the tip of his finger to the twin rows of scales that grow above Alec’s eyebrow. “Shhh,” he repeats.

The sonar call stops, Alec grows quiet and his body calms. Brow unknitting and his jaw slackening. His mouth unknots and his eyes open. Wide now they see who is looking back into them. 

“It’s you,” Alec signals to Magnus.

“Shhh,” Magnus breathes again, stroking the pleasure spot above Alec’s eyebrow and holding the rest of his new merbody as tenderly as Jace first did to him. When he first found Magnus in a pain as keen as this.


End file.
